Mod News: Sourcey

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Honestly, people: there is more than one game to make mods for. You wouldn’t know it from this week’s bunch, though. I’ve trawled the internet far and wide, and the vast majority of mod news from the past seven days has gravitated conspicuously towards a single title. Never mind, though, as some of it looks rather good. Onwards!
– This looks splendid. A Half-Life 2 mod, The Nightmare Chronicles actually seems like something produced via Psychonauts-meets-Tim Burton imagery. This mod has been going for a while, but I only just noticed via this week’s news update.

– Crazy HL2 mod GraviNULL, which released an alpha build last week, is preparing a beta with new game types and the like.

– The Dear Esther remake is half finished! And still looks absolutely, ludicrously gorgeous. I am convinced that, in a few months time, Robert Briscoe will laugh in all our faces and say, “What, you actually believed those were /screenshots/?” For example, Half-Life 2 mods don’t look like this.

– HL2 mod Kontroll releases a new vi… hang on! These are all HL2 mods! Again! Is no one making anything other than HL2 mods these days? Anyway, there’s a new in-game video here, over which people are arguing about the usefulness of text hints. I quite like them.

– …Actually, this might be worth a bullet point of its own. Half-Life 2: Episode Two Enhansed (sic) (ugh, I know) adds a load of new particle effects and other such gumph into the Ep2 engine. It actually looks rather nice.

47 Comments

What a lot of people don’t know is, that the word “enhased”, like many words in the english language, actually has german roots. “Hase” is the german word for “Rabbit”, so “enhased” literally means “with added rabbits”. Since everything that has rabbits in it is automatically better than the same thing without rabbits, the word has become a synonyme for “better”.

Since everyone is nitpicking “enhased” (and who can blame them?), I may as well be different and nitpick this:

“Less” is for measurable things (“less time”, “less water”), “fewer” is for countable things (“fewer seconds”, “fewer millilitres of water”). Hence, there is no such thing as “one less” anything — if you can count it, it’s “one fewer”.

“Less” is for measurable things (“less time”, “less water”), “fewer” is for countable things (“fewer seconds”, “fewer millilitres of water”). Hence, there is no such thing as “one less” anything — if you can count it, it’s “one fewer”.

Just my dose of pedantism for today. Cheers!

And as is so often the case with pedantry, it’s wrong.

Fewer is basically stuck with countable nouns as noted, but less is and has always been freely available for use with both countable and uncountable nouns. There is a common mythology held by people without any real understanding of grammar that less cannot be used with countables, but this has no basis in reality or common usage, and even a cursory glance at modern edited text would make this obvious.

So, how about the next time you’re considering correcting someone’s grammar, you just skip it instead? If you had done it this time, there would be two less people arguing in this thread, and the world would be a happier place.

It’s entirely possible I’m wrong in this matter, and certainly your sources seem to think so, although I’m also not alone in my thinking. Either way, I hardly think this warrants such a harsh tone in response — especially considering I originally posted with what I thought was the good intent of correcting an error, and tried to keep it quick and light-hearted as such.

I had this “rule” (true or not) drilled into me a long time ago, and hence find myself equally bothered seeing common slogans like “one less car” as seeing people misuse “your” versus “you’re” or placing random apostrophes everywhere they don’t belong. If this “rule” is not as clear-cut (or even true) as I was led to believe, then I apologise, and I’ll stop bringing it up and try to stop being bothered by it.

But seriously, relax. I appreciate the re-education, and I hardly think this conversation was the waste of time you seem to think it was.

…still obsessing over that updated Dear Esther. It looks simply amazing, and the person behind it is a true artiste. Valve, this is a modder you need to pick up, but wait for him to finish this, first! Please!

Dear Esther was interesting enough that I didn’t mind the terrible scenery and slightly broken level design, but Briscoe’s remake just looks fantastic. It’s going to be amazing.

@Truther
Black Mesa doesn’t have a release date. I don’t know where you get your ‘Episode Three’ date, but it’s not true. The only solid info is from RabidMonkey saying it “will be finished when it’s finished, and it’s pretty close,” and Raminator, saying (somewhere) that they’d release it this year or go mad.

“The team is also looking for new recruits, and is angry with the amount of people telling them off for using Battlefield 2 content in a 2142 mod, even though they have permission from EA and DICE.”

The internet, despite being a largely textual medium, seems to breed a lot of illiterate people. Or, at least, people who can write but not read. This plague even befalls RPS from time to time – in the ‘Activision shuts down King’s Quest fan-sequel’ thread, a lot of people completely ignored the repeated fact that Vivendi/Sierra had actually given them a license to create the game, and instead just raged about how much they were ‘stealing’.

Anyone who ever saw the video for the level he did for Nuclear Dawn, or has gotten lost and then shot in the face because in his CS forest map knew this long ago. I’m actually glad he hasn’t made this a mod with combat in it because I’d die a lot for the simple fact that I will be wandering around Dear Esther just goggling at the scenery rather than trying to avoid getting killed.

I’m glad you guys are at least acknowledging that the mod news articles are all Source junk. The last time I checked out the single player scene under Half-Life 2, I was pretty underwhelmed. I hope this next batch is better.

Perhaps we could make a rule that Dear Esther updates are only allowed once in every two Mod News features?

Thanks for the Desura Pimipage. The GameBeat comp is a chance for 5 start ups to pitch their ideas infront of vc’s and angle investors. Desura made the short list (from 33 entry’s) and we get to present today.

If you want to come see it (and have a gdc pass) its in room 305 (Moscone south) at 5.15 today.

If you’re going to make this column a regular thing, it would be cool if you could clearly mark your links as THESE ARE MODS YOU CAN DOWNLOAD AND PLAY RIGHT NOW THEY ARE COOL TRY THEM vs THIS SITE JUST POSTED SOME NEW SCREENSHOTS OF THEIR WEAPON MODELS TAKE A LOOK AT SOMETHING THAT MIGHT BE COOL SOMEDAY.

Cause I’m a whole lot more interested in the first category than the second.